Archives for September, 2008

One great aspect of the Internet is the amount of information that is to be found out there. Here are some links about the current financial crisis. First up, a discussion between Bill Moyers and Kevin Phillips from the site: Bill Moyers sits down with former Nixon White House strategist and political and economic critic…

Umm … Seriously, the latest issue of Nature has a special section on the US presidential election, including another Q&A with the candidates: Barack Obama accepted Nature’s invitation to answer 18 science-related questions in writing; John McCain’s campaign declined. Obama’s answers to many of the questions are printed here; answers to additional questions (on topics…

Elias A. Zerhouni, is stepping down as head of the National Institutes of Health. I heard about the announcement last night at the NERD meeting. Many were happy. Many blog commentators have added their two cents. Here are mine: 1) He’s stepping down real soon (the end of October). Why so quickly? Did something happen?…

I’m back from Toronto. And now I’m just trying to keep up with all the crap I haven’t dealt with in the last few days. Tomorrow we have an RNA Data club meeting (info here) and then I got this interesting email about some terrible legislation that might actually come to a vote tomorrow: On…

My posting frequency may go down as I will be off to Toronto for a little while. There I’ll be meeting up with Larry Moran and checking out what it means to be a Torontonian. (Larry, it looks like I’ll win the bet, but we won’t know for sure untill after Nov. 2nd.)

I’ve been neglecting science lately but I just wanted to point out that Victor Ambros, Gary Ruvkun and David Baulcombe just won the Lasker Award in Basic Sciences for their work on miRNAs, small non-coding RNAs that are encoded in the genome. These 19-23 nucleotide long RNAs regulate the stability, localization and translation of mRNAs…

Here we are going to look at the best available figures for offshore drilling, specifically the areas that are currently off-limits. That’s what the fight is about. First, how much oil we consume and how much we “produce”: The bottom line is that we consume a heck-of-a-lot more, close to twice what we currently produce.…

Well since the current US election has taken over my blog, I’ve done a couple of things. First, I’ve created a new category Election ’08 where you can find all my rants on this year’s federal elections. Second, I’ve joined a new group blog, A Vote for Science. About nine of us sb bloggers will…

We ask our volunteer army to go out and fight for our country, the least we could do in return is to treat them well, regardless of whether any one of us supported the decision to send the army in the first place. One of the best pieces of legislation ever to be passed was…